not well formed (invalid token)

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear monks I have a problem when I want to access some files which are in non-Enlish letters. I have this:

<english id="337">Barings was Britain's oldest merchant bank.</english
+>
<french id="337">La Barings était la plus vieille banque daffaires dAn
+gleterre.</french>
[download]

and I want to access it using XML:XPATH but i get this error:

not well-formed (invalid token) at line 4, column 28, byte 109:
[download]

It is becayse of the first character of "était". How it can be solved without touching the input data? Thanks.

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